Pre-war Blues, Dylan's use of, an Introductionby Michael
Gray

Because it’s so crackly on record, so
lo-fi, so immured behind a white-noise wall, the black noise that is the pre-war
blues can seem inaccessible, unreachable. To be put off by this would be to lose
great riches. Sometimes it’s best to play it really loud (and maybe go
into the next room): then you’ll hear all the joys and mysteries of esoteric
vocals, guitar magic, sheer moody weirdnesses: all the synapse-crinkling
giddy-hop that rock’n’roll gave you when you were thirteen.

Garfield Akers’ ‘Cottonfield Blues’,
especially the transcendent ‘Part 2’, comes across as the birth of rock’n’roll...
from 1929! It’s also as incantatory as buddhist chanting or as VAN MORRISON’s
‘Madame George’. (Yet Garfield Akers recorded only four tracks.) Or there’s
BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON’s ‘Motherless Children Have A Hard Time’: a record from
1927 that you hear and say of the guitar - if this was achieved then, how come
it took thirty years to get to rock’n’roll (or forty years to get to Eric
Clapton)?

Yet it isn’t that the pre-war blues
is proto-rock’n’roll that makes it so uplifting, exciting and vivid. The
experience of the encounter is comparable; and the music may hold some of the
main ingredients that rock’n’roll returned us to using - but the pre-war blues
is a liberation and an enrichment because it’s different, not merely more of the
same. These old blues are at once thrillingly exotic and our common heritage.

Garfield Akers - a deeply obscure
but compelling, intense and distinctive artist who reputedly played around
Memphis in the 1920s-30s and again in the 1950s - should have been a
tremendous star. His shockingly small number of recordings, or, say, Furry
Lewis’ ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green’, are whole new rich seams of their own, a
fresh and revelatory 3D world, as glorious as ever Little Richard and Buddy
Holly were. This blues world burns with its own heroic energy and vision, and
across a musical spectrum of concentrated emotional expression from the utmost
in delicacy and finesse to the most searing invocations of cacophonous rapture
and pain, while the language of the blues - blues lyric poetry - is one of
the great streams of consciousness of 20th Century America: a rich
and alertly resourceful African-American fusion and reinvention of the language
of the Bible and the dirt road, plantation and medicine show, of the Deep South
countryside and the city streets, of 19th Century children’s games,
folktales and family lore and African folk-memory: above all the language of the
oppressed community and the individual human heart.

For Bob Dylan then, as listener and
as writer-composer, the specifics of an old record by JIM JACKSON, BLIND BLAKE
or MEMPHIS MINNIE yield far richer pleasures than a Johnny Winters or an ERIC
CLAPTON performance.

This is not a matter of being
Politically Correct about authenticity. The whole question of ‘authenticity’ in
black music is highly complex and contentious, and involves matters far more
consequential than whether Eric Clapton plays the blues. Paul Gilroy’s riveting,
if sometimes barely penetrable, essay ‘Sounds Authentic’ cites a number of these
issues, across which white-boy debates about authenticity in the blues are bound
to stumble rather clumsily, and from which, as Gilroy writes, authenticity
‘emerges as a highly charged and bitterly contested issue.’ It’s an issue too
large to detail here.

Rather than argue, therefore, as to
whether the blues can really be called the blues when purveyed by the Claptons
who speed ‘black cultural creation on its passage into international pop
commodification’, it seems more useful to suggest, as Bob Dylan probably would,
that that sort of blues is simply no longer interesting. It can’t be:
such is its shopping-mall forgetfulness that it’s no longer interested
- in either the specifics of where it’s come from or of what it’s thrown away.

Dylan stands in a very different
relation to the blues from that of the white frontmen of the transglobal blues
industry. He occupies a position as near to that of the poet or composer (even
to the critic) as to the rock’n’roll performer. This difference arises from how
he feels about the potency and the eloquence of the old blues records and the
expressive vernacular of the world they inhabit. This is why what Dylan wants to
do with this immense, rich body of work is experiment in how he might utilise
its poetry, its codes and its integrity - to see how these may stand up as
building blocks for new creative work - just as he (and just as the blues)
uses the language and lore of the King James Bible. He is not concerned with
translating a few lowest-common-denominator dynamics of the blues into some
MTVable product.

First, he claims no blues-singer
specialism like a JOHN HAMMOND Jr.: it isn’t, for him, his trademark. His stance
does not downgrade blackness per se, therefore: does not carry the inherent
sub-text that blues is essentially a matter of ‘style’. It’s telling that on
those rare occasions when Dylan performed to specifically black audiences, as in
Greenwood Mississippi in 1963 and at the women’s penitentiary in New Jersey
during the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975, he didn’t hesitate to sing about
racial politics but chose to do so via his white ‘protest’ songs - ‘Only A
Pawn In Their Game’ and ‘Hurricane’ respectively - rather than via blues
songs. In contrast, witness the spectacle of John Hammond Jr. imposing his fussy
impersonation of an old blues-singer upon the embarrassed black occupants of a
Mississippi bar-room for his TV documentary ‘In Search Of Robert Johnson’.

Second, Bob Dylan’s interest and
special dexterity is in exploring the innards of the blues, taking from the
blues the strengths of its vernacular language (to some extent musically as well
as lyrically) and building them into the core of his own work - into the
machinery of his own creative intelligence. As, in this spirit, he raids the
Bible, traditional white folksong and nursery rhyme, so he raids the poetry of
the pre-war blues.

To do this to such creative profit
would be impossible without a mix of curiosity towards and respect for the
original contexts from which these things are seized and reworked. This
guarantees that, unlike many of those in the global blues industry, Dylan has no
interest in seeing the blues ‘deprived of its historical base’ (to quote a
Living Blues magazine editorial condemning ‘white blues’ as ‘not blues’).

Then there’s a question folklorist
Peter Narváez raises when he contends that ‘While historically many forms of
downhome blues were played by soloists, and urban blues have always featured
individual entertainers… blues fans today recognise blues as a collective
activity, that is, a music played by groups who interact among themselves and
with audiences.’

We can at once picture Bob Dylan’s
response. On the one hand, he too interacts with groups and with audiences. More
than ever before, in fact, live audiences seem indispensable to him. Yet he has
always believed in the power of the artist with the lone guitar and a point of
view. As he said in 1985: ‘I always like to think that there’s a real person
talking to me, just one voice you know, that’s all I can handle - Cliff
Carlisle... Robert Johnson. For me this is a deep reality: someone who’s telling
me where he’s been that I haven’t, and what it’s like there - somebody whose
life I can feel.’

At the same time, he knows that the
music and the poetry of the blues, its fundamental assumptions, are founded in
an Africanness that is itself characterised by ‘groups who interact among
themselves and with audiences’ - a theme that the great blues field-recordist
and collector ALAN LOMAX, for instance, repeatedly stresses in his 1993 book
The Land Where The Blues Began.

In other words, the lone blues
guitarist would have a different point of view, a different way of expressing
him or herself, if the culture from which the blues arose had not been a
communal, democratically interactive one - one in which there is almost no
hierarchical Artist Up Here and Audience Down There, but, rather, a
collaborative performance in which the singer/musician takes cues moment by
moment from the dancers/spectators and mingles physically among them, his or her
repertoire as much a reaction as an imposition.

This is a very different kind of
participation from mass-marketed blues performances in which big-name
entertainers and high-energy tyro groups please hyper crowds with the most
easily magnified clichés of the genre transmitted through flashy guitar-solos
and greatest-hits repertoire.

Dylan himself
talks about the crucialness of old blues couplets (though if he hadn’t, we would
know their importance to him from the vast extent to which he has drawn from
their wells of material and added to them) in 1985:

‘You can’t say
things any better than that, really. You can say it in a different way, you can
say it with more words, but you can’t say anything better than what they said.
And they covered everything.’

That the young Bob
Dylan could insinuate his creative imagination into the world of the older white
and black folk artists to enrich even very early songs of his own is not in
doubt. What is still more interesting is to look far beyond his very early work
to the period from 1964 onwards, when increasingly he freed himself from writing
within borrowed folk formats: and to see the huge extent to which, having found
the blues powerful and real, and having come to know it so intimately and
inwardly, Dylan has drawn deeply from its poetry in creating his own.

In the end, it
isn’t the main point whether Bob Dylan discovered these people in or around
Dinkytown or Greenwich Village, on the radio or via the incredible diverse
riches of the blues records avalanching onto vinyl in the 1950s and 60s.
Engaging though it is to retrace his routes to these discoveries (see
pre-war blues, Dylan’s ways of accessing, alsoin The Bob Dylan
Encyclopedia), in the end, the point is that he made
them.

And he uses, so
singularly, the huge amount he learnt, in the construction of his own
extraordinary work. No-one else has used the blues in anything like the way Bob
Dylan has. Most people who are ‘into’ the blues take a few standard numbers and
riffs from it, and run with them in ever more amplified, clichéd, unrooted ways,
or else, at the other extreme, bore us to death with their pedantic archival
reproductions of obscurer-than-thou acoustic repertoire. The far smaller number
of people whose work is genuinely enriched by the blues are usually musicians,
rather than singer-songwriter musicians.

But Dylan takes
myriad complex treasures from the pre-war country blues, both passionately and
quietly, paying them at least as much loving attention as he pays to the vibrant
strengths of those 1940s-to-50s electric blues that made possible, more than we
knew at the time, all the taken-as-givens of rock’n’roll. And he draws all this
cultural richness, the music and the lyric poetry of it, into the very core of
his own work. Dylan has worked the blues so strongly and resourcefully that he
has given it something back.

He inhabits the blues as the best of
the old bluesmen themselves did, fusing traditional and personal material into
fresh, expressive work of their own, layered with the resonance of familiarity,
the subconscious edits of memory and the pleasures of unexpected recognition,
sharing the energy that flows between the old and the new, and between the
individual and the common culture. He has used the blues with such insistent
individuality, yet never in bad faith to the gravitas he found within it, or to
the world in which its people had moved.

Interviewed in San Diego in autumn
1993, Dylan said: ‘The people who played that music were still around… [in the
early 1960s], and so there was a bunch of us, me included, who got to see all
these people close up - people like SON HOUSE, REVEREND GARY DAVIS or SLEEPY
JOHN ESTES. Just to sit there and be up close and watch them play, you could
study what they were doing, plus a bit of their lives rubbed off on you. Those
vibes will carry into you forever, really, so it’s like those people, they’re
still here to me. They’re not ghosts of the past or anything, they’re
continually here.’

It should be no surprise, therefore,
to find that blues lyric poetry is everywhere in Dylan’s work: in amongst the
New York City hip culture of Dylan 1965 and the radical acid-rock of Blonde
On Blonde, in the evangelism at the start of the 1980s and work of more
modest, mellowed knowingness right on through to the darkness of Time Out Of
Mind and the teeming good cheer of ‘Love and Theft’.

Blues lyric poetry runs into the
mainstream of Dylan’s work, while he in turn makes a clear creative contribution
to this major form of American music. It follows, then, that
the more you know of the blues corpus, the more you’ll appreciate Bob Dylan’s
extraordinary regenerative use of it; and the better you know Dylan’s output,
the better placed you’ll be to hear the blues coursing through it.